File this as the most amazing video that I’ve seen in a long time. A father and sun team put together a weather balloon with an HD video camera and an iPhone for GPS tracking and sent it to the edge of space.

As an Anglophile, this warms my heart. The British are returning to space with three new craft that will study the earth.

From the BBC:

A £100m project has been announced to launch three new British spacecraft to image the surface of the Earth.

The satellites, to be orbited in 2013, will be able to see details down to one metre at their best resolution.

It is a commercial venture between the spacecraft manufacturer Surrey Satellite Technology Limited and its data processing subsidiary, DMCii.

Nations that would not necessarily need their own dedicated satellites will be able to buy time on the spacecraft.

“This constellation of three satellites will be owned and operated from the UK but the capacity on the spacecraft will be leased to different international customers,” explained Sir Martin Sweeting, executive chairman of SSTL.

The BBC is reporting that scientists now think that two asteroid strikes may have finished off the dinosaurs instead of one (which was the prevailing theory).

From the BBC Article:

The dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago by at least two meteorite impacts, rather than a single strike, a new study suggests.

Previously, scientists had identified a huge impact crater in the Gulf of Mexico as the event that spelled doom for the dinosaurs.

Now evidence for a second impact in the Ukraine has been uncovered.

This raises the possibility that the Earth may have been bombarded by a whole shower of meteorites.

The new findings are published in the journal Geology by a team lead by Professor David Jolley of Aberdeen University.

When first proposed in 1980, the idea that a meteorite impact had killed the dinosaurs proved hugely controversial. Later, the discovery of the Chicxulub Crater in the Gulf of Mexico, US, was hailed as “the smoking gun” that confirmed the theory.